Innocence. Julian Barnes
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meaty themes, though it is characteristic of Penelope Fitzgerald that their presence grows on our awareness slowly, even furtively. Just as she thought it bad literary manners to overburden the reader with too much information or research, so the real heart and purpose of her fiction are often camouflaged. Note, for instance, the double use of ‘perhaps’ in the quotation above, as if the author were saying: perhaps I’ve got it wrong and this isn’t the case at all, and anyway perhaps you are the better judge of my story than I am.
We tend to think of innocence as a passive virtue, displayed by those who wait and suffer; ‘innocent’ is naturally paired with ‘victim’. Fitzgerald is more interested in the active components of innocence, so that in the novel it is less a noble virtue, let alone an indicator of moral superiority, and more a practical characteristic, a way of dealing with the world. So Chiara Ridolfi, aged seventeen, is ‘ready to regard the world as a friend’; she doesn’t tell lies, ‘not even in the concert hall’; and she assumes ‘as a child does’ that those she loves must also therefore love one another. One comic example of the impact such innocence makes on the outside world is in her driving, described as ‘alert and reckless’. More serious and central is her manner of falling in love with (the Southern, self-made neurologist) Salvatore. In this she is just as alert and just as reckless, breaking social codes as she would drive through a traffic light. But her innocence also expresses itself in an intensity and relentlessness which Salvatore often cannot handle, any more than he can handle the intolerable sympathy his mistress Marta displays when he gives her up:
It struck him that both Marta and Chiara took advantage of him by attacking him with their ignorance, or call it innocence. A serious thinking adult had no defence against innocence because he was obliged to respect it, whereas the innocent scarcely knows what respect is, or seriousness either.
The opposite of innocence is calculation, as displayed by Monsignor Gondi, a Ridolfi connection by marriage, who is constantly scheming and networking. (There is also a ‘shrewd’ gardener at La Ricordanza who has a cameo role.) But apart from these, all the characters in the novel exemplify different ways of being innocent. The Ridolfis have their ‘trust in the triumph of good intentions’. Salvatore is ‘pure and simple, self-created, self-determined, forewarned and unclassifiable’. His ‘serene willpower’ serves him well with patients, but away from work he constantly misreads others, often deciding in advance how they will behave, only to be innocently surprised and monumentally exasperated. Sannazzaro, the old friend of Salvatore’s father, has a ‘pure irreproachable heart’ and ‘all the nobility of life’s authentic losers’. His political hero is Gramsci, whose idealism was his own form of innocence (Fitzgerald mentions Gramsci’s denunciation of Stalin, which led to his being disowned by the Party). On Cesare Ridolfi’s estate there is even a whole colour-coded dovecote: white pigeons in the loft, white angora rabbits on the ground floor – a menagerie of innocents awaiting their massacre.
Happiness, and the application of innocence in its pursuit, is the plot’s motor. There are some, of course, who do not believe in happiness, or rather regard it as none of our business: the Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, back in the 1560s, had warned his Ridolfi brother that ‘human happiness must be left to Heaven’. Maddalena Ridolfi, sister of the current Count, was briefly married to an Englishman whom it proved impossible to make happy; later, she is ‘tormented’ by ‘the failure of old people to be happy’. Cesare, their nephew, seems not to have considered the question at all. Sannazzaro believes obsessively that Salvatore cannot be happy unless he buys back his family land in Mazzata. It is left to the novel’s two young proponents of innocence, Chiara (the Count’s daughter) and her English schoolfriend Barney, to both believe in happiness and actively pursue it. Barney, all of eighteen, has a ‘capacity to dispel opposition, like a tractor going solidly through … heavy ploughland’, and, tractor-like, she drives at three successive targets, hooting her love in their direction. This does not seem a perfect strategy. Chiara, unlike Barney, does not yet know her own mind, being constantly distracted by ‘the unsettling vision of other points of view’ – until she meets Salvatore. ‘Alert and reckless’ meets ‘self-determined, forewarned and unclassifiable’. She now declares to Barney that ‘every minute of her life’ is wasted ‘unless we can be together and unless he’s happy’ (the assumption presumably being that if he is happy, so will she be). He, in turn, when Aunt Mad wonders what kind of man he is, declares: ‘The kind that loves your niece Chiara, and would give his life for her.’ There is no doubt that they are both equally stricken – ‘they loved each other to the point of pain’ – and yet their whole relationship proceeds by a sequence of misunderstandings and shouting matches, with Salvatore constantly irate, or about to become irate. Fitzgerald daringly chooses to show only this combative aspect of their relationship. Theirs must be one of the least romantic romances in fiction. Or is she perhaps hinting that it is only the sentimental among us who assume that love leads to happiness? As Salvatore at one point asks himself: ‘What is all this about happiness? We never talked about it in Mazzata.’
When analysing Fitzgerald’s fiction, it feels crude, almost indecent, to strip out and isolate main themes like this, because her novels, more than most, are organic and interwoven, textured like life. Here, matters of innocence and love inextricably overlap with other concerns: about imagination versus reality, historical authenticity, the nature of art, and – the moment where theme and treatment merge – the question of human misunderstanding. Innocence is constructed around and through a number of masterly scenes, usually between two people, in which minor to major misunderstandings occur: between Giancarlo and Chiara, Maddalena and the dressmaker Parenti, Salvatore and the lawyer Nieve, Maddalena and Mimi, Chiara and Salvatore, Barney and just about everybody, and (a surprising conjunction, which operates the plot’s final lever) Maddalena and Sannazzaro. Even the clearest expressions of truth and feeling – as in Barney’s vast and touching declaration of love for Cesare – may seem less clear cut to their recipient. As for Chiara and Salvatore, they finally attain what Fitzgerald calls ‘their own system of misunderstanding’. This, we are invited to feel, is some kind of marital achievement, as sound a basis for living together as any other.
Innocence is a novel which, atypically for Fitzgerald, is studded with dates. She always brought to the fiction she set back in time (the term ‘historical novel’ seems misleading, diminishing) a profound sense of period, the result of considerable research worn as lightly as possible. Innocence has this too; but it is also backed up constantly with dates: from the 1568 of the opening scene to 1904 (premiere of Madam Butterfly), 1910 (present of a wristwatch to Giancarlo), 1921 (last time Parenti made a dress for Aunt Maddalena), 1924 (flood compensation for Gentilini’s family), 1937 (death of Gramsci), 1942 (closure of tomatocanning factory in Mazzata), 1943 (last time Chiara’s diamonds were worn), up to 1955 (year of the novel, when Chiara meets Salvatore). There are almost thirty such dates, some of a public nature, some private to the novel’s world, some passingly thematic (thus Butterfly is a love story in which an innocent is destroyed). Fitzgerald clearly wants us to think of the novel’s action as something rooted in the previous half-century of Italian history; but perhaps these marker-points were also felt necessary in a novel in which the characters are so often at sea about one another’s meanings.
And just as Fitzgerald takes care over the novel’s prehistory, she also – much less obviously, and on only a couple of occasions – attends to what will happen beyond its conclusion. Both moments occur in Part Two. Chapter 2 begins:
Looking at the photographs of a wedding taken nearly thirty years ago one can’t believe that so many, who now look as they do, once looked like that.
This is followed by a description of Chiara’s wedding photographs – in other words, we are in 1985, the year of the novel’s composition. So who is looking at them, who is this ‘one’ who ‘can’t believe’ in what time has wrought? Is it the author, is it the reader, or one of the characters, or all three of us sitting side by side? It might be a reasonable assumption at this point that the novel intends to expand upon those thirty years before its end. As it would, even more strongly, with the second flash-forward, in chapter 23. Here Barney, having set her sights on her third possible He, confidently announces to Chiara that ‘You must let us know … if you’re ever in Chipping Camden.’ Fitzgerald continues:
Chiara